Radiation safety

Time to stop confusing nuclear weapons with nuclear power

Even among more open-minded observers, the tendency to conflate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons is hard to resist. Both technologies involve the release of energy from atomic reactions, and nuclear energy was originally developed by the U.S. Navy as a source of electricity to power submarines and aircraft carriers.

But it is also extremely misleading. Neither the physics nor the technologies are the same, nor are the institutions that manage the two technologies. Nuclear weapons today involve fusing two atoms together in an uncontrolled explosion. Nuclear energy involves harnessing the decay of naturally occurring radioactive elements in a slow and controlled reaction, creating heat that turns steam turbines.

Nuclear facilities such as Hanford are a legacy of the headlong rush to build enormous nuclear weapons arsenals at the height of the Cold War. Faced with an existential threat from an enemy who had promised to “bury” us, the developers of America’s nuclear arsenal didn’t worry too much about the toxic hangover in the rush to produce plutonium for new and ever more powerful weaponry.